August 4, 2003

When our spiffy new website launches in a week or two, we’ll be adding several more superb titles to our catalog, by primo practitioners ...

For starters, I’m stoked about finally finding David Illig PhD again. David makes really superb Ericksonian hypnosis CDs on various topics, and it was his excellent tape that inspired me to start making tapes for my clients, way back in 1983 or ’84.

I first ran across his work when my then 14-year-old son, Aaron, and I were leaving a bookstore, and David’s Win at Sports tape caught his attention. Aaron was an excellent pitcher, but flat feet made him a slow runner, so he was eager to improve his grounder-scooping capability. He asked me to buy the tape for him. (Just as an aside, those flat feet have since been totally cured by yoga. Who knew??)

A couple of weeks later, when Aaron reported that he thought he was running faster, I snagged the tape and listened to it myself. To my surprise, I discovered that it was a really skillfully rendered, top-notch, Ericksonian hypnosis narrative, very much in line with a high-level course I had taken at Sheppard Pratt a couple of years earlier. The guy was GOOD.

Okay, so flash forward to last year. Our new CEO, Dan Kohler, decides it’s time to include some new practitioners in our catalog. I still remember this guy, and search the net and finally find him. Then it takes me another year to make contact with his organization and persuade them that we are on the up and up. Then I have a moment of panic, as in "What if he’s not as good as I remember him to be?" so I ask the company to send me some samples, which I listen to. To my delight, they are even better than I remembered, because by now I’m better at evaluating these things, and it is very clear that David Illig, as luck would have it, totally rocks.

So for starters, we’ll be carrying 3 of David Illig’s CDs. We’re starting out offering his titles for Self-Esteem, Weight Loss and Stress & Anxiety Reduction. His technique is a wonderful counterbalance to guided imagery – similar but different – and I urge you to give it a try as a complement to what you are already doing with my imagery, Martha Howard’s excellent guided meditation CDs or Emmett Miller’s superb hypnosis/imagery work. His audios also include simple, subliminal, positive suggestions that are strategically designed to act as counterpoint to the hypnosis work. (I’ve read all the subliminal suggestions and they are just fine.)

I’m also delighted to report that we will be carrying a wonderful new audio, Managing the Distress of Chemotherapy, by Farmington Hills, Michigan psychologist Carolyn Daitch PhD. It’s beautifully done, and I think this recording provides an excellent alternate to our Health Journeys Chemotherapy imagery, which can get a little old if that’s all you’re listening to.

And more good news: Health Journeys’ awesome composer-musician, Steve Kohn has just completed a long-awaited new music CD. Inward Journey is a beautiful collection that includes the lush, wide-ranging music from the Healing Trauma imagery; the rousing, energizing, empowering music from our Cardiac Rehab imagery (AKA Chariots of Oz); and the beautiful, evocative imagery from Peaceful Dying. This is a glorious collection for meditators and for those who need gorgeous music to support their narrating guided meditations to their clients. Whenever I play this new music in workshops, the first thing participants want to do is get the music separately. Now, at last, we can accommodate them.

Another long awaited treasure: we now have Betty Mehling’s Magic Island, that fantabulous, groovalicious kiddie imagery, for kids 5-12, available finally in CD format. That has been posted on the shopping cart for a week now here , and it’s flying outta here.

In time for the new website launch we’ll also have my Health Journeys Smoking and

And we found a really superb yoga teacher, Sudhakar Ken Macrae, who offers two CDs of Sadhana Yoga. The instruction is elegant in its clarity, simplicity and cleanness, and his instruction goes way beyond the stretches themselves to guide the placement of attention, the breath and the spirituality of the practice. So we’re proud to be including these 2 fine CDs in our catalog in a couple of weeks.

And finally, one of my all time favorite DesktopSpa practitioners, Suzanne Scurlock-Durana, has a new CD set called Healing from the Core that is one of the best instructional sets for self-generating energy healing I have heard. These practices are dynamite for increasing energy, balance, presence and resilience in anybody, but they are especially helpful for people with Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, and other chronic pain and fatigue conditions. Suzanne’s work will be available in 3-session mini-series, and in a full 10-session volume, also in a couple of weeks with the new site launch.

The Asheville workshop continues to fill up, as does the one that follows in Sand Key. If you are interested in registering, click here.

We are thrilled to announce that a new study with our PTSD imagery, Healing Trauma, will be launched at Duke University and the V.A. Medical Center in Durham by Psychiatrist-Researcher, Mimi Butterfield and psychology intern Jennifer Strauss. Because imagery is such an important intervention for trauma, and at the core of so many effective interventions, we feel it’s really important that studies like these get underway. We are already very grateful for the research of Leslie Root PhD at the Biloxi VA (being prepared for publication now) and the Transcend program created by Beverly Donovan PhD and Edgardo Padin-Rivera PhD at the Louis B Stokes VA in Brecksville Ohio.

Psychotherapist, author and guided imagery pioneer Belleruth Naparstek is the creator of the popular Health Journeys guided imagery audio series. Her latest book on imagery and posttraumatic stress, Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal (Bantam Dell), won the Spirituality & Health Top 50 Books Award